I wrote this post two months ago while waiting for my airplane to go to Albania. In the midst of working and travelling it somehow got lost in the depths of my tablet. However, having now returned home and recovered from my jetlag, the post has resurfaced. Without further ado; the musings of an Albanian archaeologist at an airline gate.

I’m sitting somewhere in Atatürk airport, awaiting my gate assignment.  In all honesty, I’m still groggy from sleeping on the plane 8+ hours.  I wasn’t planning on writing anything today – I had given myself the day off, but then an idea hit. As I was sitting there, thinking about nothing in particular, a guy, maybe in his late 40’s early 50’s asked me if there was WIFI here.

Good question I thought, I don’t see why not. All airports offer some sort of WIFI. So I open up my phone and showed him that there was a WIFI and that you had to sign in through the browser etc. It wasn’t working for him for some reason. Now I was determined. So I tried to get it to work on my phone. I was actually surprised that the WIFI here is not actually free. You had to put in your number, get a code, put in that code, then you get your free two hours of WIFI. This is slightly problematic if you’are with a plan back home that charges insane fees for roaming. So, there’s no WIFI for me today.. and that got me thinking.

It is sort of funny that it was almost inconceivable that there would be no WIFI available. WIFI has become a basic right. When you don’t have access to WIFI or a cellular network at least, you instantly feel disconnected. At least I have in the past. When I would go back and forth between Starkville and Toronto, I wouldn’t have a phone number in Toronto. So the second I stepped out of the house, I was unreachable. That used to terrify me to no end.

“What if have to make a phone call?”

“What if I got lost?”

“What if I needed to look something up?”

Or worse – “What if got board and couldn’t scroll mindlessly through Instagram.” Quelle vie!

If I, a 24-year-old, 90’s baby, went through WIFI withdrawal, how must it be for the generation that was raised with smartphones and tablets in their hands? The generation that is chronically diagnosed with ADHD, that doesn’t know what its like to play outside all day?

I’m not trying to blame technology or the internet, I love both, but sometimes I wonder how deep the effects of such a dependency on these things have on us. I’ve spent a lot of time in airport gates lately, the scene is always the same: almost everyone is on some sort of device, a smartphone, a tablet – plugged in. There are people camped out by plugs to charge their ever-draining batteries. I myself am no exception. Not only am I typing away on my tablet, I’m listening to music on my phone as well (Nothing Else Matters – Metallica).

I often wonder how this dependency on technology has affected human behavior. Overall, I think technology has drawn us into ourselves and made us terribly inpatient.

“But it can connect us to people around the world!” You may argue.

True, very true, but while you’re talking to someone across the world, who are you not interacting with that is right in front of you? People go to bars and cafes with friends and spend most of the time messaging other people.. that seems so ironic. My friends and I have recently made a conscious effort to keep phones away when we are hanging out, especially when we are having dinner or grabbing a coffee. What a difference it makes. How nice it is to have fully engaged conversations with no distractions. With no absent-minded “huh” or “yea..”

We have become so content to plug into our phone that we can be in a room with others and talk to no one. It has become such an epidemic that talking to people is perceived as weird and only done in the rare instance that the WIFI is not working or cannot be found. It’s strange, its almost as if we are scared to talk to each other. The man who asked me about the WIFI sounded so uncomfortable like he was pushing himself to ask me.  Last time I was coming home from Starkville, I was sitting next to this woman. And she asked me if she could use my phone to call her brother because she couldn’t sign into the WIFI. I am not proud to say that my first reaction was to tell her I was uncomfortable with giving her my phone. And then it hit me, the irony of it all! I consider myself a culturally relative ANTHROPOLOGIST, above all, a decent human being. So why could I not lend this woman my phone ?! So I apologized and offered her my phone.

I am not saying the answer to this WIFI dependency syndrome is to oblige every stranger that decides to talk to us. But maybe it would do us all a little good to unplug every now and then and interact with those around us. Put away your phone for a few hours when you’re at home and spend some time with those around you. Ask them how their day went, what is on their mind, what their favorite song is at the moment (if you’re wondering, mine is Brother’s in Arms by Dire Straits). It might do humanity a little bit of good if we relearn how to interact with each other. After all, we are social beings, and the ability to effectively interact with others was a key trait in our evolutionary path.